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September 30, 2004

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is a great book. It was George Lakoff's summation of everything known through 1987 on the subject of mental categorization, and how the conceptual organization of the mind is expressed through metaphors. Lakoff adduces dozens of examples from linguistics, cognitive psychology and anthropology to demonstrate the psychological reality of his theory, and SC regards it to be a reasonable first approximation of a True Theory of Mind.

The essential data structure for Lakoff's theory is a device called the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM). An ICM is a concept (or cluster of related concepts) that define our knowledge of a category. At the center of an ICM are those features which most strongly characterize the category. Thus, to loosely borrow one of Lakoff's examples, a bird has two wings, can fly, has a beak, etc. Members of a category which most strongly fit the definition imposed by the ICM are called prototypes. A prototypical bird would be something like a sparrow or a robin.

Not all members of a category are prototypical, though. Some members deviate in just one or two ways, and some are barely recognizable as members of the same type. A chicken, for example, is less characteristic of our mental prototype of a bird -- it can't fly all that far, and the proportions of the body are rather different than those of sparrows or robins. Compared to ostriches, though, chickens are positively prototypical. What this means in practice is that: 1) categories are graded, and 2) the organization of mental models is radial (think of spokes on a wheel, but with some spokes longer than others).

The argumentation in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things enriches the model considerably, but Lakoff doesn't assume much more than the basic model presented above, and so we'll stick to that. He does give a typology of prototypes, though (p. 8-11), and we'll list them here, since they'll be relevant later on. All examples provided here are paraphrases of Lakoff. Central subcategories are the core types to be adhered to/deviated from by real entities. Thus, if one category is "political thinkers", central subcategories are liberals and conservatives. Typical cases are what we usually think of; i.e., robins and sparrows when someone says "bird". Ideal cases are (possibly abstract) exemplars that we measure real objects against; in the present works, Lakoff offers alternate conceptions of ideal parents, ideal citizens, etc. according to the different worldviews in play. Anti-ideal cases aren't merely the negation of the ideals; they represent the demonology (Lakoff's term) for a given worldview. Stereotypes are properties associated with groups on the basis of myths or well-known individual examples; Lakoff gives "drunken Irishmen" and "industrious Japanese" as examples of stereotypes. Salient exemplars are memorable examples used to draw analogies to categories; they're some of the specific individuals that give rise to stereotypes. Finally, essential prototypes are bundles of features we associate with categories; they help us create folk theories of the "essences" of things (which shouldn't be understood as necessarily literally true). Beaks are essential to birds; hardness is essential to rocks.

This mental machinery suggests that human beings do best at reasoning by analogy, which is exactly how Lakoff claims we go about much, if not all, of our thinking. Lakoff is a committed philosophical materialist, and extends that with particular claims that our reasoning is "experiential"; we create and extend our categories, and create analogies, based on our actual experience (as opposed to having them innately, and living through things trumps reading about them). SC doesn't share or endorse all of Lakoff's commitments in this regard, but for present purposes, we'll stipulate that analogical reasoning is about the best way available to make use of the categorical architecture presented above.

So how does this apply to politics? Lakoff postulates that our political thought is primarily derived from analogies to our most strongly familiar models of group dynamics -- thinking about families. Lakoff asserts that the core metaphor underlying all political thought, regardless of your specific views, is "Nation As Family". This is a strong claim, and Lakoff precedes it with a presentation of the ways in which moral reasoning is not metaphorical. Moral reasoning is held to be experientially grounded (pp. 41-3), largely through various dichotomies. It's better to be healthy than sick; rich instead of poor; beautiful rather than ugly, etc. All this falls under a category of "well-being", and it's our thinking about well-being that leads to our moral systems, which in turn produces our political thought.

The well-being category is not metaphorical, but the way we think about it is. Specifically, Lakoff holds that we think about it in terms of accounting -- "keeping the moral books" (p. 44). The metaphors that Lakoff invokes are "Well-Being As Wealth" and "Moral Action As Financial Transaction" (p. 47). These terms are at least superficially plausible; Lakoff provides examples of reciprocity (i.e., "I owe you one"), retribution ("You'll pay for this"), revenge ("I'll get you, Gadget!" [that's not Lakoff's, is it? -- ed.]), and so forth. The key concept about morality is that our accounting metaphor includes notions of moral credit and debt. Doing good things builds up your own moral credit; having good things done for you builds up your own debt. Doing bad things also builds up debt.

One powerful example of morality as accounting is Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" (p. 57). King speaks of cashing a check, signing a promissory note, a bad check. The notion of moral bookkeeping like this covers our conception of rights and obligations. When we talk about rights, the financial metaphor helps us understand that there are corresponding obligations on someone else's part to facilitate them. Thus, Lakoff writes, "if you have a right to an education, someone has a duty to provide it".

The financial metaphor also helps us understand moral notions of fairness. There are many different models of fairness (p. 60), like "one child, one cookie", or "one person, one raffle ticket". The model of fairness we assume to be correct is dictated in no small part by our understanding of how the moral books have been kept, and Lakoff ascribes differences in political views to the ways in which we draw analogies from financial thinking to specific cases of possible fairness/unfairness. The reader would be correct in guessing that this most significantly underpins Lakoff's explanation of how we come to our views on affirmative action and taxation.

Lakoff ties this discussion back to the "Nation as Family" notion by arguing that we formulate our views about raising our children by reasoning about how the moral books are kept, and what it will take for our children to successfully interact with other people according to those principles. Government policies represent similar problems to those we face in raising our children, and thus, we draw on our experience of raising a family to decide how we want other citizens to be treated, and how we want our nation as a whole to interact with other nations.

This last part is something that your host is not entirely willing to concede to Lakoff. One can readily accept that we draw analogies between child-rearing and government based on the same principles that we use in order to draw analogies in other parts of life. But as we will see in subsequent sections of this review, Lakoff assigns an almost Freudian primacy to the explanatory power of his theory, and frequently claims to be puzzled by apparently counterintuitive behaviors by both liberals and conservatives, which can only be resolved by appealing to his theory. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem -- if we could be sure that Lakoff's models of either conservative or liberal thought represented their objects accurately. As we will demonstrate later, not only is this frequently not the case, but there are often alternative explanations for political positions which do not require Lakoff's theory to be invoked. In the next section of our review, we'll discuss some of the systematic methodological flaws that plague Lakoff's attempt to construct models of political thought.

Last week, SC promised to review George Lakoff's new book, Don't Think of an Elephant!, a promise which we're going to begin keeping right now. However, thinking about this over the weekend prompted your host to reconsider how he was going to approach it.

One really can't effectively critique Lakoff's contributions to political discourse without understanding the underlying research program that his comments emanate from. Furthermore, your host intends to keep Semantic Compositions a rigorously nonpartisan blog, and the point of any criticism emanating from these quarters is not to refute Lakoff's views as a partisan. It is, however, to demonstrate how his views have led him to take a worthy theory about cognition and metaphors, and turn it into a rather less impressive theory of political speech.

So in order to discuss his new writings, your host has decided to begin the process with a review of the book that made Lakoff's name in this venue, Moral Politics. As was noted before, the official SC view of it is: good theory, bad practice. We're going to flesh that out over the next few days, in an argument like so: First, the essentials of Lakoff's theoretical approach, and the common ground that SC is happy to concede to him. Second, the methodological flaws of Lakoff's specific application of the theory to the political domain. Third, the cartoon understanding of conservative thought that makes Lakoff's analysis disastrously wrong. Finally, after all that, we'll spend some time addressing both the problems with Lakoff's analysis of liberal morality, and why Don't Think of an Elephant! is bad advice for exactly the causes Lakoff is trying to advance. Afterward, we'll compare Lakoff's books to similar interdisciplinary studies from psychology and political science, which in your host's view suffer from many of the same faulty assumptions.

Note that there are two editions of Moral Politics, and SC is working from the second; your host doesn't believe that changes anything significant, but it might be relevant for page number citations.

It must be Mexican food day at Semantic Compositions, because your host is going to write for the second time in less than 12 hours on something to eat from south of the border. What's that proverb, "a burrito a day keeps the doctor in pay"? Something like that. Anyway, SC just finished a carton of one of his very favorite non-root beer things to drink, and since that means it doesn't need to stay in the fridge, he can type at his leisure.

That drink would be horchata, a Mexican delicacy made with milk, rice, and cinnamon. Until about two years ago, it was very difficult to find a real dairy horchata in mainstream grocery stores; the demand simply wasn't perceived to be high enough outside of ethnic neighborhoods. Then Nestle took a gamble and released a line of "aguas frescas" (literally, "fresh waters"; what they all have in common is that they're water infused with something else by boiling) under the Kerns label. Why milk is considered part of a natural class along with the jamaica flower, tamarind fruit, and strawberries, SC will never understand, but they're all aguas frescas in the traditional Mexican nomenclature.

In any event, the carton includes a panel with messages directed at both English and Spanish-speaking audiences. Despite appearing right next to each other, the Spanish is not at all a translation of the English. First, what's on the package:

Milk & Rice Drink: Looking to try something new? Kerns brings you "Aguas Frescas" -- a delicious, refreshing and authentic drink, popular in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Like the traditional beverage, Kerns Aguas Frescas are available in a variety of exotic flavors such as: Horchata -- a smooth and light-tasting milk and rice drink with a hint of cinnamon; Limon -- a light-tasting, refreshing drink, with the flavor of fresh squeezed limes; and Fresa -- a light-tasting and refreshing strawberry juice drink. Consume cold or serve with ice for a delicious, refreshing drink anytime.

SC's translation of the Spanish: Mealtimes were something everyone looked forward to. Set out on the table were rich foods and jars brimming with delicious aguas frescas, which I remember now with great affection. Now, Kerns Aguas Frescas bring us the chance to again enjoy those delicious flavors.

Obviously, the messages are aimed at very different crowds. Monolingual English speakers are probably not too familiar with aguas frescas in general, never mind horchata alone. SC would love to know if "light-tasting" and "refreshing" focus-grouped with ratings normally reserved for puppies and Mom ([except for you, cat-man -- ed.]), since they seem to get a pretty intense workout, but the general message is "This is new; it's exotic; it's unfamiliar". The message to Spanish-speakers is: "Nestle understands you. We're your friends. You grew up with us (even though we only introduced this 2 years ago so you didn't really). You know you want what's inside this carton." There's no rule that says that English and Spanish placed side-by-side on a package have to say the same thing, but it's not often that you get an insight into just how differently marketers sell the same product to different crowds from simply reading the label.

September 29, 2004

Neal Whitman has a very enjoyable post up about work that Elizabeth Hume is doing on metathesis. SC appreciates the reminder that this is the word he was reaching for in the recent discussion of "Calvary" and "calvary", as the type of phonological error that it could be.

At the end of the post, Dr. Whitman comments:

Aside from the above highlights, though, it seems that Semantic Compositions and I are in good company in enjoying fast food linguistic analysis: On p. 223, Hume has a fun discussion of the alteration of chipotle to chipolte.

At first, your host was moved to comment on his observation that he hasn't heard (perhaps more accurately, hasn't noticed) this alteration. But it certainly is within SC's experience that "chipotle" has different pronunciations among the crowd that likes to flash their knowledge of Spanish phonology versus those that tend to ruthlessly assimilate their pronunciations into English.

Essentially, the difference is a matter of vowel quality. A Spanish speaker, or KABC's traffic reporter (a man whose speech shows no trace whatsoever of a Spanish accent until he signs off and rolls the r's in his last name), pronounces "chipotle" as three distinct syllables. To use a grossly inappropriate non-IPA transcription system, it comes off as "chee-POTE-lay", with three distinct vowels serving as the nuclei of each syllable. On the other hand, people prone to butchering foreign borrowings pronounce it as "chip-POTE-l", with a syllabic "l" at the end just like "poodle" (SC will attest to versions with and without a geminate "p"; some people say "chi-POTE-l").

Webster's indicates four pronunciations as canonical, including a version which renders the last vowel as though it rhymed with the name "Lee". Your host can't say he's ever heard that one before. But there's a larger question that SC has no good answer to: are there single preferred pronunciations for words like this from the standpoint of a monolingual English speaker? Recognizing that there are a wide variety of regional accents, and just plain idiosyncratic features of individual speech, and that these will affect any one speaker's judgment of the "right" prounciation, how would one judge whether a pronunciation is better or worse in accordance with one's understanding of both the foreign word and English phonology?

This is not unlike the gradation in judgment we often make between "nuclear" and "nucular', where one prounciation carries the stigma of sounding uneducated. Your host imagines that, at least in some circles, pronouncing foreign words in an assimilated fashion sounds less educated, but it's also easy to imagine other social contexts where making a show of code-switching is considered merely pretentious. SC finds that he has no intuitions (or at least very weak ones) on the relative prestige of pronunciations of "chipotle".

September 28, 2004

Sometimes, your host does things which cause him to be so embarrassed that he doesn't know what to do short of posting about it and letting his readers join in the fun. This is one of those moments.

Today happened to be the birthday of Maternal Grandmother SC (henceforth, MGSC), and so to celebrate, Mom SC brought her up to a regional mall not far from Chez SC to spend the day, concluding with dinner with family. A sensible plan for a pleasant day.

While a gentleman never asks the age of a lady, nor discloses it if he happens to know anyway, suffice it to say that walking is no longer foremost among MGSC's talents. In order to facilitate a day of traipsing around malls, Mom SC therefore decided to surprise MGSC with a device she mistakenly believed to be a wheelchair. In fact, it is something called a "rollator", or a wheeled walker. A product similar to the one actually bought can be seen here; SC is unable to provide a more reliable picture for the reader's edification because the tag identified the walker as a product of "Dr. K.", a company which apparently has no Internet presence, nor is commonly sold online. However, the picture is similar enough to give the reader an excellent idea of what followed.

Although the rollator has four wheels, only two of them are actually able to turn for the purpose of changing directions. They happen to be the two wheels located under what looks like, from the perspective of someone who thinks it's a wheelchair, a backrest for the seat. Mom SC reported that MGSC had great difficulty using the wheelchair; would SC mind taking a look?

After inspecting the device, your host "discovered" that in order to successfully change directions, it helped to back up while turning in the opposite direction of the one you want to go forward in. Much like driving in reverse, really. A few minutes of practice sufficed to give SC reasonably impressive skill in "driving" with the rollator. MGSC found the whole thing rather counterintuitive, though, and is likely to return it.

When your host returned home, he discussed it with Mrs. SC (who is presently out of town, and who otherwise would have prevented this from happening). After SC explained to her the difficulty of a wheelchair that had to go backwards to turn, she started to suspect that the problem wasn't the chair. Why, after all, weren't the steering wheels mounted in front? It all came together when your host explained that mounting the chair in a way that would put those wheels in front would require lifting the rider's legs notably higher than most elderly people can easily tolerate.

That's when Mrs. SC realized that your host wasn't describing a wheelchair, he was describing a walker! Under no circumstances should anyone try to ride one of these devices; instead, the "backrest" is actually a handlebar, and the seat is meant as a convenience for use when the user gets tired. Why, then, is it equipped with handbrakes? Not to stop someone from riding too quickly, but to stop it when they want to walk around the side and sit down. Needless to say, Mrs. SC had quite a good laugh over SC's total inability to figure out the proper use of the rollator.

There is a linguistic lesson in this, or at least a psychological one. As with a Rorshach test, given the outline of a novel object, your host imposed on it the label that most closely corresponded with similar objects in his previous experience. Once the rollator had been characterized as a "wheelchair", he similarly assigned names to the parts which followed naturally from a belief that the object was a chair, and not a walker. Thus, the handlebar became a chair back, and the handles above the brakes became armrests. Only, the back wasn't a back, and the armrests weren't armrests. But SC had such strong associations between the form of what he was seeing and other wheelchairs, that he simply could not see a walker until someone who knew better told him so.

There's a new linguistics blog in town, and SC heartily approves. It's called the Polyglot Conspiracy, and it's started off very promisingly.

SC directs your attention to a typology of airquotes, including a hilarious discussion of how they ought to be transcribed. SC also admires the audacity and confidence required to file that post under "sheer cleverness". Of course, your host also applauds the strategy of commenting here to get noticed. Bravo!

In contrast, the article demonstrates Kerry's supposed attempts to appeal to young people by saying "blah blah blah", characterized as "an idiom likely to be heard among teenagers in a shopping mall, but not on the Senate floor". They quote Kerry like so:

"You're going to hear all this talk, `Oh, we've turned the corner, we're doing better, blah, blah,'" he said, running on the phrase as his Wisconsin audience erupted in laughter. "You know, blah and blah and blah."

Of course, in the absence of any actual data on Sen. Kerry's speech habits over time, it's rather doubtful that this story started out as anything more than a bored reporter noticing him saying "Heavens to Betsy!" one morning. That particular phrase probably isn't something the Senator says very often, but it's hard to believe that he really speaks as though he's on the Senate floor no matter what the context is, as the article suggests at one point. Of course, judging by the list at the end of this article, it's also possible that the writer has no clue about actual Congressional decorum.

September 27, 2004

The Washington D.C. city councilman quoted in this article as saying "Technically, the police officer is right, but the result is wrong" probably has the best argument, legally speaking. But your host's new hero is still Officer George Saoutis, who did this to an obnoxious cell phone user:

He handcuffed the 23-year-old woman, called for backup and took her to a cell where she was held for three hours before being released to her aunt. She was charged with two misdemeanors: "disorderly manner that disturbed the public peace" and resisting arrest.

Your host has been annoyed for some time by the realization that cell phones with hands-free kits have made it impossible to figure out if people apparently having loud, animated conversations with nobody in particular are lunatics -- or simply on the phone ([why choose? -- ed.]). It irks him twice as much when he mistakenly thinks that one of these lunatics cell-phone users is addressing him, asks...and then watches them get angry, as though it were obvious who they were talking to. A few arrests could go a long way towards helping these people rediscover common decency, if not actual manners.

Andrew Sullivan, writing about a New York Times article on blogs, coins a new word:

The good news is that the blogosphere has grown so large and robust that we can now slag each other off with abandon. Attaguys!

Google turns up no hits for it, but might by the time you read this. Needless to say, those hits will be at andrewsullivan.com and here ([so why did you say it? -- ed.]). Naturally, SC checked for parallel coinages:

It's easy to foresee a string of stories coming out for an indefinite, but long, period of time, demonstrating that Google is even more involved in censorship than is already known.

The easiest way for Google to stop having to answer questions about why they censor some search results and not others is to simply stop pretending that they have a policy against censoring search results. They're well within their rights to serve whatever links they want -- if you're feeling shortchanged by Google's results, stop paying for them. But insisting that users believe that they have such a policy is insulting.